Technical Field
This disclosure relates to methods and systems supporting computing and data processing systems. More particularly, a system and method for generating an electronic catalog for online computer users is described.
Related Art
Conventional systems, like Amazon.com, can display a listing of items for purchase by online shoppers. However, these item listings are typically arranged in one of several sorting orders provided by the host site. Some existing systems can also categorize items into groups or categories based on the host system's determination of relatedness between the characteristics of the items for sale. However, sometimes a host site's determination of item relatedness may not suit a particular user. Some users may wish to group items in arbitrary ways that the host site did not consider.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,130 describes a multimedia product catalog and electronic purchasing system that provides multimedia product presentations in real-time, by combining locally-stored data and data received from a remote server. Large volumes of data, representing product information such as motion images and sound, are stored locally on the system's data storing unit for fast data access. Small volumes of product time-variable data are received over a network from a remote server, which also has a transaction management function. The purchasing system is a PC-based purchasing system, equipped with multimedia capabilities. It uses a purchasing application which is distributed beside the large volumes of product-related data on a portable support such as a CD-ROM.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,082,426 describes a method for processing plural product information records from the product information sources into one or more groups based on which product information records are likely to correspond to the same product, correlating a unique product corresponding to the product associated with each of said groups to identify the product, comparing each identified product to categories of a taxonomy to determine a category for the identified products in the taxonomy, and determining attributes for each categorized product based on the product information records corresponding to each group, creating product specifications based on the determined attributes and storing the product specification in the corresponding determined categories of the taxonomy.
Thus, a system and method for generating an electronic catalog for online computer users are needed.